At a time when spoiled
billionaires seem to get anything they want, Banksy’s act of vengeance can
appear deeply satisfying, but there is more going on here than a simple
loathing of the rich and powerful. In my recent book Art After Money,
Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization I
argue that the fate of art is a bellwether for broader trends in society, trends
that affect not only artists but practically everyone else.

The primary trend is financialization.
Usually this term is taken to refer to the increased power and influence of
the financial sector:
big banks, hedge funds and other firms in The City or on Wall Street. Even
before these institutions started using algorithms and
AI to automate the trading of assets (which include things like
the world’s food supply)
this industry had already created havoc in the global economy by transforming
it into a kind of casino.

But the notion of financialization also speaks to the way in which nearly everything in our society
is being transformed into a means for someone to make profit, or reformatted as
if they were corporate products. Even public services like education,
health-care and anti-poverty initiatives are managed and spoken of as if they
are ‘investments.’ Young people are increasingly taught to see themselves not
as the next generation of citizens but as private speculators improving their
human capital to compete on the job market. Housing has increasingly come to be
seen as a private means of securing wealth for tomorrow and hedging against
future economic uncertainty in a world where few forms of collective insurance
(such as state-backed programs for social welfare) remain.

In the financialization
of art, then, we see a grim reflection of wider trends. It’s not
simply that art has become the plaything of a financially-engorged global
elite. After all, even in the Italian renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age or 19th
century Paris, rich patrons and benefactors have always shaped art markets.
Today, however, the influence of fast money on art (and everything else) is
more profound and
penetrating.

Over the past 20 years, a whole array of intermediaries have emerged to
help transform art into a purely financial
asset. These include art investment funds that
allow wealthy people to buy art for speculative future returns; the mushrooming
of secretive and hyper-secured Freeport
facilities in Switzerland, Singapore and elsewhere where
investors can stash their masterpieces in climate-controlled vaults, the better
to buy and sell their rights to ownership or hide these assets from taxation;
and a wide range of institutions (like the world’s leading insurance brokers)
and startups who jockey to provide services to those who leverage art as
a special asset
class as part of a carefully counterbalanced portfolio of mega-wealth.

The accelerating speculation on the financial value of art has led to a
rise in demand for new saleable works, since many of the old classics have
already been snatched up. This has led to all manner of aesthetic pathologies
and the rise of whole new genres of art like the notorious “zombie formalism”
of 2014 - a term introduced by art critic Walter Robinson to
describe the inoffensive but technically proficient work of a set of very young
American artists (all graduates of extremely expensive art schools) who
rocketed to market success as speculative bonbons of the plutocrats.

As a staunch anti-capitalist and someone who is generally more interested in
protest banners than artistic canvases, I couldn’t care less about the
fate of ‘great art’ under financialization. What’s more important are two
things that this process is teaching us about the societies in which we live.

First, art offers us an excellent example of the ways in which almost any
social institution can be financialized, even something as obscure, diverse and
just plain weird as art. Historically art markets have been notoriously
opaque and cliqueish, and the trends and currents of artistic
fashion and innovation are, by their very nature, delightfully unpredictable,
fickle and arcane. A century after artists like Duchamp’s Fountain
- where a everyday urinal was transmuted into ‘art’ by the magic of the
artist’s signature - art is everywhere and nowhere, taking the form not only of
paintings and sculpture but performance, text, concept and even participatory
activities. That our financialized economic system can so thoroughly conscript
and subsume art into its operations should give us pause for thought.

In this context everything of potential future value is transformed into
an asset to be leveraged, and one in which we are each, no matter how humble
our means, tasked with becoming a miniature financier. We have learned to see
our education, housing, skills and even personal relationships as investments
to be put into play, to see all aspects of our life as a terrain of lonely
competition. Take, for example, the rhetoric that surrounds visual art classes
for children: these are typically presented as an ‘investment’ in the skills,
capacities and cognitive development of the child as a future worker or
economic agent.

Financialization has remade society in its image, and in this moment,
financialized art (regardless of what is or is not on the canvas) presents us
with a kind of collective self-portrait. No wonder we delight in its being
shredded. As the radical philosopher Walter Benjamin warned
almost a century ago in his prophetic work on art’s relationship to capitalism
and fascism, “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience
its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

Secondly, almost 20 years ago the noted British cultural theorist Angela
McRobbie observed that, in post-industrial societies, artists were increasingly
being held up as the “pioneers of the
new economy” - new model workers for a neoliberal age of freelance,
temporary, part-time, episodic careerism in which people must compete for gigs
by leveraging their own passions, connections, determination and personal portfolios. In the intervening years
Richard Florida’s notion of the “creative class”
has dramatically influenced policy-makers and urban planners around the world
who imagined that attracting and retaining artists, designers and other ‘creative’
workers would raise the fortunes of struggling economies and communities.

‘Creative destruction’ and ‘disruptive innovation’ became keywords for
the rapaciousness of financialization as it tore apart whole industries in
search of short-term profit. While in 1968 the slogan “all power to the
imagination” was a radical threat to capitalism, by the mid-2000s it
was a corporate rallying-cry, with tech firms leading the way in redesigning
managerialism around the excitement and
elicitation of their employees’ creativity.

Ultimately, financialization names a moment when our imaginations have
been turned against us. We are increasingly exhorted to orient our creative
powers towards the tasks of economic survival - juggling debt, precarity and
anxiety while trying to leverage anything we can to stay afloat or get ahead.
What is missing is the broader, radical
imagination: the possibility of questioning and reformulating our
societies and economies altogether. While individualized, quarantined,
competitive creativity is valorized everywhere, collective or social creativity
- the creativity that would allow us to transform our
lived reality together - is increasingly foreclosed.

Banksy’s self-annihilating work reflects this condition. Accusations that
it was self-serving because it potentially increased the future sale price of
the work seem to me to be in bad faith: first, Banksy is already rich and has
had many opportunities to get richer if he wants to. Second, the piece had
already been sold for the hammer price: even if Banksy were the seller (which
is unclear) he would (except in certain jurisdictions) not see any profits from
the future resale of the work. But that doesn’t change the deeper fact that the
hyper-financialized art market has refined its methods for generating speculative
value out of anything, even acts of defiance.

To my mind, we can read this intervention in several ways. On the one
hand, it can be seen as emblematic of a certain kind of nihilistic
self-loathing: the artist destroying their own work as a pyrrhic but ultimately
harmless gesture of cynical defiance. There but for the grace of god go any of
us. On the other, it can be seen as an invitation to ask much deeper and more
profound questions: if the financialized economy that is so sickeningly
reflected in the art market depends on putting our creativity to work, then what
if we were to withdraw those services? How can we strike, and strike
back, against a financialized order where even our defiance can become an
object of speculation? To what other ends could our imagination,
individually and collectively, be put?

About the author

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair
in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University where he also
co-directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab. He is author, most recently,
of Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against
Financialization (Pluto 2018). Follow him on twitter @maxhaiven

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